The large share of importance attached to bees, and the widespread extent of the habit of bee-keeping in former times, has left its mark upon the face of the country in many a popular place-name and field-name, whose significance is not perhaps generally appreciated by others than students of folklore and archæology. Mr. Sydney Oldall Addy, in his learned work on Hallamshire, entitled The Hall of Waltheof (1893), enumerates the following instances in Derbyshire:—Honey Spots, a field of two acres between Hope and Pindale; Bean Yard, at Ashover; Pointon Cross, at Hucklow; Poynton Wood, just outside Dore; and several fields bearing the name of Pitcher Croft in the immediate neighbourhood; and he shows how every one of the words, or roots of words, italicised, in some way or another preserves a directly etymological allusion to the bees or beehives having been kept from of old in the locality so named. If Beeley, Beelow, and Beeholme are doubtful instances in point, as being capable of another interpretation, it is perhaps not wholly unfeasible that the received derivation of Bentley from Benets’ lag, or meadow, may have to be amended to bee-field.
But be that as it may, the olden system, in the tangible form of payments reckoned in honey and wax (itself a computation dating from at least as far back as the Domesday Book, in which two Derbyshire manors, those of Darley and Parwich, to wit, are valued at so much current coin of the realm and so many sextaries of honey apiece), endured without a break all through the catastrophe of the Reformation, and afterwards almost down to our own times. Thus, in the parish of Hope, part of the small tithes pertaining to the vicar were paid in honey and wax. As far back as 1254, tithes of honey formed part of the emolument of the Vicar of Tideswell. In fact, in the Peak district generally, it was customary for every tenth swarm of bees to be claimed by the parson of the parish, a right which continued to be acknowledged until nearly as late as the middle of the eighteenth century. Thus in 1743, the then Vicar of Castleton records in his journal the receipt of a swarm of bees by way of tithe. Elsewhere, though actual payment in kind had become obsolete, a small fixed duty, payable to the parson in money, long survived. In some parishes, in addition to the ordinary tithes, Easter dues upon various kinds of stock and produce were chargeable, under which head the assessment of bee-keepers was fixed at 2d. per head. In the parish of Twyford, as the Terrier shows, the like sum was claimed “for every hive of bees in lieu of tithe-honey and wax”—a claim which did not cease to be recognised until the nineteenth century, when, in a general re-adjustment and commutation, it was abolished. So the last lingering tradition of the old order was changed, and finally perished.
And here is the place to speak of the fate of the rood and of its accessory loft. Now, although the destruction of rood-lofts, screens and roods, in so far as they were involved in the destruction of the monasteries themselves, may be said to have begun under Henry VIII. in 1536, being followed, two years after, i.e., in 1538, by the order for the demolition of all roods and images alleged to be abused by superstitious devotions and offerings—the diversion of the latter into the hands of the King and his myrmidons being, of course, the real motive of the attack—the general and systematic destruction of roods did not take place until Edward VI. came to the throne, nor that of rood-lofts until nearly the end of the third year of Queen Elizabeth. The precise date of the order is 10th October, 1561. It decreed that rood-lofts should be taken down in every church and chapel in the land. It is essential, however, to note that at the same time that rood-lofts were abolished, the partition of the chancel—such was the term then used for the rood-screen—was expressly and emphatically ordered to be maintained. It is a noteworthy fact, also, that in the set of articles put forth for Archbishop Parker’s first metropolitical visitation (that of 1560–1), which included the county of Derbyshire as part of the diocese of Coventry and Lichfield, no reference whatever is made either to roods or rood-lofts. Meanwhile, however, the order of 1561 was promulgated, and Parker then entered upon the campaign in earnest. His visitation articles of 1563 contain the inquiry: “Whether your rood-lofts be pulled down according to order prescribed, and if the partition between the chancel and church [i.e., nave] be kept?” The same question would naturally go the round of the southern province, within which, as is well known, Derbyshire lies. In 1565, then, when Bentham made a visitation of the county, among the instructions issued for the occasion is found the following:—“That you do take down your rood-lofts unto the lower beams, and do set a comely crest or vault upon it, according to the Queen’s Majesty’s Injunctions set forth for the same.” This shows that Derbyshire enjoyed no exemption from the general order already mentioned. Two years later, i.e., in 1567, Parker, in his metropolitical visitation, reiterated his previous order of 1563; evidence as to the standard that was required throughout the country. Nor did his successor, Edmund Grindall, fail to follow his example. In the new archbishop’s articles to be inquired of within the province of Canterbury in the metropolitical visitation of 1576, the question is asked: “Whether your rood-lofts be taken down and altered, so that the upper parts thereof with the soller or loft be quite taken down unto the cross beam” (this, of course, means not the rood-beam but the transverse beam or breast-summer), “and that the said beam have some convenient crest put upon the same?” Later on, when, in 1584, Overton visited the Lichfield diocese, he inquired, among other points: “Whether your rood-lofts be clean defaced and taken away?” It is unnecessary to pursue this phase of the subject any further; but it is scarcely to be wondered at if, from such persistent and accumulated hostility on the part of the authorities, as I have retailed, no Derbyshire rood-loft has survived to this day in its complete and original state.
According to an inventory of the year 1527, there were in All Hallows church, Derby, a “pair” of great organs, and another small “pair” beside. Further entries, occurring both under the dates 1569–70 and 1582–3, mention the existence of the leaden weights “which lay upon the organs” to compress the bellows. Whence it has been inferred that because the almost invariable place for the organ in pre-Reformation times was the rood-loft, therefore the latter structure was still standing in the church down to 1583. But surely the evidence on the point is negative, and far too slight to warrant any such conclusion! For the documents which speak of the organs are altogether silent as to their whereabouts in the building; and even though they may have been situated originally on the top of the rood-loft in All Saints, in the face of the notorious fact that rood-lofts throughout the country had been condemned twelve years previously, the bare mention of an organ outliving the general wrecking of the rood-loft (which, indeed, it was fully entitled to do, from the legal point of view) cannot be taken for proof of the law in force against rood-lofts having been disregarded in this or in any individual instance, unless there be produced some more direct and explicit testimony to the contrary.
If Dr. Pegge is to be credited, the rood-loft was still standing in Chesterfield church in 1783. At Staveley, it is recorded to have stood until 1790. At Hayfield, until about 1815, it remained entire, according to the Lysons; and according to the same authority’s manuscript notes at the British Museum, though the fact is not recorded in their published history of the county, the rood-loft still survived at Taddington in or about the year 1812. Possibly, also, at Tideswell the rood-loft, although transferred to the west end of the church, remained until as lately as about 1820. Beside these, there are no authenticated instances of the survival of the ancient rood-loft in Derbyshire after the date of the general destruction.
This measure was as arbitrary as also it proved, within no great space of time after, to have been shortsighted. It was arbitrary because, considering the circumstances at the date of the decree being issued, it was uncalled for and unwarrantable, once roods themselves had ceased to be. For the ruin of roods accomplished under King Edward had been so immense, that their restoration in the short space of Mary’s reign could not but be partial; and already Elizabeth’s puritan friends, acting upon her injunctions of 1559 against “monuments of superstition,” had hastened to destroy as many images as were found standing at the date of her accession—and that, one may be sure, with the greater energy and thoroughness, since the Queen herself was really suspected at first of being unsound in this very matter of the crucifix. The order of 1561 was unreasonable, therefore, because every one of those customs, such as the burning of lights before the rood, or hanging up festal branches and garlands about it, clothing it with holiday robes or Lenten wrappings, the ceremonial stations at its feet, accompanied by sprinkling with holy water or by censings—these and, in fine, whatsoever other observances in olden days had had the rood for centre and object, were necessarily quashed and rendered no longer practicable thenceforward, the rood itself having been abolished. That the order was shortsighted, too, is patent from the fact that in consequence of it there sprang up a fresh crop of difficulties, which have never been satisfactorily settled nor disposed of to this day. I refer, of course, to the question of organs and choristers, and of the most convenient and suitable positions for them relatively to occupy in a church. The rood itself had indeed vanished, but with it not all the functions and uses of the rood-loft. That the latter had, from a practical point of view, enormous advantages, is a fact which, lost sight of at the time amid the frenzy of bigotry, which insisted on its being condemned to destruction, very quickly began to be appreciated after that the ancient rood-loft was no more.
It is a highly instructive object-lesson, and one not unprofitable eke for our own times, to note what ensued; nor can I, with the facts of the case before me, impugn the logic of the extreme reformers, who were so ill-content with the disappearance of the rood-loft that they never ceased to agitate for the prohibition of church organs as well. This, then, happened. The opponents of instrumental music in divine service were not allowed to have their will; and yet the retention of an organ after the organ-platform, the rood-loft, to wit, had been done away with, was very quickly found to be unworkable, unless some other provision were made for it and for the singers, whose voices the organ was meant to accompany. The removal of the rood-loft at the east end of the nave, therefore, was inevitably followed, sooner or later, by the erection of a gallery at the opposite end of the nave. In some instances, indeed, portions of the old rood-loft were actually re-erected, being incorporated in a new organ-gallery at the west end of the church. Thus, at Parwich, when, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the old west gallery came to be taken down, the main beam of it was found to have a carefully chamfered edge and to have been enriched with painting and gilding, thus proving beyond all question that it must have formed one of the timbers of the ancient rood-loft, if not the original rood-beam itself.
Scarcely more than fifty years had elapsed since the demolition of rood-lofts had been ordained before a gallery was erected at the west end of All Hallows, Derby, and, what is more remarkable, in 1636 another, upon which the term, not void of significance, “loft” actually occurred in the inscription to commemorate the donor’s name and benefaction. Nor was this the only example on record. Another inscribed “loft” was erected at the west end of Heanor church in 1633, and another at Osmaston in 1747, while several more, though not explicitly so inscribed, were, as contemporary evidence proves, referred to at the time as “lofts.” Of these, the gallery at Ashover (1722), at Bakewell (1751), and at Stanley (1765) are examples. At Marston-on-Dove, in 1712, the parish agreed to erect a “loft,” as the recorded proposal for the scheme shows, “for ye schoolmaster of Hilton and his scholars and ye singers to sitt in.” At Hayfield, as shown in a plan of the seating accommodation and scale of charges for the same, under the date 1741, “every singer upon ye organ loft” paid the modest sum of 4d. a year by way of pew-rent. Again, at Hayfield a new “loft” was set up at the west end of the building in 1746.
If the Osmaston example carries the tradition of the “loft” forward as far as 1747, on the other hand the Heanor example affords a most valuable link with the remoter past by carrying back the tradition to the period of the pre-Reformation rood-loft. Standing until within living memory, it bore the inscription: “This loft was built at ye sole cost of John Clarke, of Codnor, gent., in the year 1633, who dyed Ano. Dni. 1641, et Anno Ætatis 88”; on the face of it a dry and prosaic statement of fact, but yet to all who can read between the lines, how eloquent a tale of the times does it unfold, for this man, who at eighty set up a singers’ gallery or loft in his parish church, would be a child of about eight years of age at the date when the royal decree went forth for the general destruction of rood-lofts.
If the coincidence is the more striking in the case of galleries erected at the east end of the nave, exactly on the site of the ancient rood-loft, as at Chesterfield and the neighbouring village of Old Brampton, at Eyam, Mellor, and Tideswell, it must be admitted that the west end of the nave was the more usually selected position. Western galleries are known to have been in use in the nineteenth century in the following churches, amongst others: Allestree, Ashbourne, Beighton, Brailsford, All Saints’ new church in Derby, Duffield, Eckington, Etwall, Killamarsh, Kirk Ireton, Long Eaton, Mackworth, Marston Montgomery, Matlock, Morley, Mugginton, North Wingfield, Parwich (old church), Smalley, Spondon, Stanley, Taddington, Tickenhall (old church), Wilne, and Wingerworth. Although at the last-named the base of the rood-loft remains, the destruction of the parapet had made it unsafe for use, and necessitated the erection of the newer gallery. The above list might be very much extended, but there is no need to multiply instances.